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But to generate invisible tags easily, as requested by Aiuto, the simplest way is probably to use the usual bookmarklet or (if you have Firefox) Greasemonkey script - see this post. Then (suggestion courtesy of my Magical Sheep pardner Truckspy), you make the tags invisible through CSS by adding this to your blog template, between the <style type="text/css"> and the </style> tags in your head section.

.technoratitag {display:none;}

That ought to work and shouldn't stop Technorati from picking up your tags, assuming (assuming!) their bots read the source rather than the displayed page, but if anyone has problems do say. And remember Technorati (and possibly Google too) don't like invisible tags so they may well do something to stop invisible tags being indexed, so use 'em at your own risk! (I find it best to have my tags visible, but tiny, like in my posts).

9 comments:

You could also just put rel=tag in any link you create. Example [a href="" rel=tag]MyPage[/a]. Technorati would look at that and think there was a tag called 'MyPage' so it works best with one word links. The href part doesn't actually have to point to technorati.

That's right Scott, as Kevin/epeus says, it's the last bit of the URL that gets picked up as the tag.

But I do see why some people want their tags to be invisible, so as not to clutter up their pages but with their posts still appearing on Technorati's and Icerocket's tag pages. As I've said before I personally think it should work both ways and you should give people the chance to find other similarly tagged posts if they want to, but I think it's up to the individual blogger. Of course the URLs don't have to point to Technorati, they could point instead to the relevant Del.icio.us tag pages, or Icerocket's tag pages, if the blogger wishes.

Thanks for your post. I have inserted "display:none" and it works fine.I like invisible tags because my blog would be a "humoristic" blog, so if I have to repeat some words (used in a post) into the tags, the final effect is not humoristic (i.e. I wrote a post on "enlarge your penis" spam; do you like see a tag: enlarge+your+penis, penis, enlarge...?).Sorry for my english.

I create invisible tags by not putting in a word to link to. I want the tag so that people searching Technorati can find the post if they are searching for the tag, but I dont need words at the bottom of the post.

For example, if I were tagging the post as Politics, I would write the tag as: I just don't put the word "Politics" after the rel="tag". It works. Technorati recognizes it as a tag.

Cima, what you say makes sense - a valid use of invisible tags, to me, in the context of your blog.

Gary, that's right, I mentioned the "not putting in a word to link to" method in a previous post and at the moment it seems to work though Technorati don't like it (so they may tweak things to stop it working, at some point!). But when using a tag generator, the CSS way is easiest I think.

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